Some users have been noticing that their "Value" (that's the third component of your reputation, along with Connections, Participations and Skills) has been going down of late, despite them getting mostly good ratings. The "Value" component is basically a reflection of how people rate your contributions. The more and higher ratings you get the higher your value.

For the purposes of this process, only the contributions and reviews submitted in the last 90 days count. So if someone gives you 5 stars today for a post that you submitted 89 days ago, this rating will only help you for two days. In two days the message would be expired and so will be all the reviews on it. The message can still be accessed on the site (we keep them for around 135 days) but the ratings won't count. The reason for this is to take into account users that change their behavior either for good or bad.

The Value component, like all reputation elements are just a ranked list of users. So your value is relative to other users. If other users do better and you stay the same, your value will go down. This is exactly why some users, despite no apparent change on their behavior or how their posts are rated, are seing their value go down. We made a change last month, as described here www.sportsline.com/mcc/blogs/entry/5816134/6081805 that essentially removed the penalty of users getting low ratings. So all those users that had many negative ratings under the old system suddenly don't have them anymore, and now their value is higher and they leapfrogged others who managed to stay away from those low ratings.

So for instance, say that two users, call them X and Y have the following ratings:

X: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Y: 5, 4, 3

Under the old system, X would have a value around 50 while Y's would be around 75. Under the new system, X would be at around 75 and Y at 60. Why? Consider also two other users W and Z:

Z: 5, 5, 5, 5, 5

W: 1, 1

Under both systems Z would have a perfect score (99) while W would get around 10 both times. So what this has done is really mix up users in the 35-75 range.

So what can you do about it? Participating in highly trafficked threads (like those at the bottom of stories linked from our home page) is one of the best ways. Posting too much on fast moving, little content threads (like those official game threads), can backfire. The more ratings you get from the wider diversity of people the better. A lot of ratings from the same clique doesn't work as well as the same ratings from a lot of different users.

And don't worry too much about it. As I always say, the people at the top of the reputation scale are often the ones that care the least about it. They just produce good content that others enjoy.